Occasion for Loving Page 24

  “You still in with Congress?” she said.

  “I’m still in Congress.”

  She said, “You know, all that—you forget all about it here.” She laughed.

  “Oh yes?”

  “Yes, I mean it …?” She was smiling at him, fiddling with things on the table, drawing his thought harmlessly out into the open. “The only black man I can’t speak to, and the whites I don’t speak to either—I just look at them sometimes, like looking at a Boudin …” The tension of holding the intruders at arm’s length produced the impulse towards a careless openness. She lazily said what she pleased whether he (and she herself) liked it or not. “I can tell you it’s true that you could probably live here without thinking of it right until they came up from the cane with knives and sticks and finished it off without giving you time to give it a thought.”

  “You could?” he conceded, half-challengingly, half-ironically. The whites he knew never put themselves in this sort of context; it was always as if he and they were considering a third kind of person there. They looked at each other and laughed. When she said to him again now, “I don’t know why you came to me,” he only leaned across the table and took a banana and answered in the dry, amiable insolence between them, “Didn’t think you’d mind so much.” And added, almost with sympathy, “Is it because of him?” He meant Boaz.

  “Has there been something final?” she said, forced to ask, slumping in her chair.

  “They were talking day after day. I hadn’t seen her for two days. Then she phoned. She was in a hell of a state. All of us—” He had the face suddenly of a man who sits thrown against the wall, open to blows, given up, his only defence do-what-you-like-to-me. “Then she picked me up in the car.”

  “When was this?” Jessie was as impersonal as a clerk filling in some form.

  “Thursday—Friday. A week ago.”

  While he was speaking Ann had wandered in, her hands pushing up the sleeves of a dressing-gown as she clasped her elbows. She came forward and then paused, following with slightly open mouth what they were saying as if she had walked in on a scene that she knew and was listening to hear that all went as it should. She looked far more exhausted than before she had slept, and held her eyebrows high and frowning.

  “A week ago,” said Jessie. She looked at them both. They felt the meaning, surprise, rise in her; they ignored it, like people pretending modesty.

  “Do they know where you are?”

  “No … Well, no.”

  “… we’ve been on the move,” Ann spoke. She pushed up a crumpled table-napkin and slid on to the table, supporting herself with one leg on a chair. “I see there are some towels in the cupboard. Can I have a bath?”

  Jessie got up practically, but before she went through the door, she said it: “You really can’t stay here, you know.” She was looking at them both kindly, truthfully, doing away with artificial casualness.

  Ann said, as if it were a matter of interest and had nothing to do with intentions, “Why not?”

  “The boy—for one thing. I don’t know what someone like that would make of it”

  Ann burst out laughing. “But since when would you care about a thing like that?” She was surprised into objective amusement, offering it as a reassurance to Jessie about herself.

  In the bedroom that had not been used until that afternoon Jessie hauled down towels. “Only one of them’s a decent size—I didn’t bring a lot.” She put them on one of the rumpled beds. “I bought these the day you came, last year; my only preparations,” she said with a smile.

  “I suppose we can stay the night?” said Ann.

  Jessie sat down on the bed, holding her bare ankle. “You see, I don’t know you at all, Ann, it’s just as if you walked in here for the first time. Boaz says to me, you know how she is, she wouldn’t do this, she would do that, but, as I keep telling him, I don’t know at all how you are.”

  The girl had the open, dazed look of someone who emerges from one of those dark journeys at a fun-fair that really only progress through a canvas tunnel hung with ordinary objects like feather-mops and clinging cloth, but that establish a link between fearful fantasy and the ordinary.

  She stood there unembarrassed, only a little unsure. “I suppose I don’t think about people the way you do. I mean we’d slept in the car two nights and I thought of you being just here, on your own, with this house.”

  It was fair enough. People like themselves kept open house in a particular way; it was nothing to do with “social” life and there was no regulation of times and days: somebody needed a place to work or to be alone in, a place to live through a certain stage in his life—one granted it or claimed it according to circumstances. Yet Jessie was strongly aware that she was not “just there”, and the two could not be “just there” in this shelter with her. This was not the old house, the Stilwell house where life was various. This place was completely inhabited, for the present, by her being; couldn’t they sense it?—she thought: it must fill the place, like a smell. If they came to her here, it must be through some special and deeply personal connection with that being.

  She fought the idea, because the instinct to protect herself made her want to prevent Ann from discovering it. She stopped herself from saying. “But why me? Why to me?”—with its reminder to the girl that Boaz was the one she, Jessie, knew. She said, returning to the observer’s tone, mildly curious, “A week. Where, for God’s sake?”

  “Oh, all over the show …” Ann dragged a small case on to the bed, opened it on wild disorder—suddenly the room where it must have been packed existed between them, the room where all the stringed and bulbous instruments leaned against the walls, and Boaz sat, bare feet under the table; Morgan’s old room—“Gid had some friend near Messina, we went there, then we thought of Basutoland, I don’t know, any old where,” she took a piece of clothing out, looked confused, “—where’s the top, dammit?—He’s a sweetie, this chap Mapulane, but of course it was impossible, he’s got a jolly nice little house and they were marvellous but it’s in a reserve … Then we thought we’d go to another friend of his, that’s the one in Basutoland, and I’ve never seen Basutoland anyway. Well, that didn’t work out …” She laughed; her hands began to turn over the contents of the case again, slowly.

  “Was there some sort of decision behind this? D’you know where you’re going?” Jessie asked.

  The girl picked up the bath-towel, a tin of talcum and a packet of cigarettes. “I don’t know what happened. The whole thing was finished. It felt O.K., really. And then while we—Boaz—were talking about other things, about ordinary things, beginning to be ordinary again—you know, just hanging around in the room together talking and tidying up a bit and so on—I began to feel scared. I can’t explain it. I began to get absolutely panicky, and I couldn’t tell him, I would’ve felt such a fool.”

  “I’d better phone them and say you’re all right.”

  “Tom wasn’t there. He’d gone to spend a few days with his father.”

  “I know. I had a letter from him at the old boy’s. But he’ll be back by now.”

  “No bath for two days. Just bits of washes in clean, A.A.-approved rest-rooms while my driver took petrol.” Her face was blank for a moment, then she laughed.

  Jessie passed through the dining-room, seeing the outline of Gideon sitting smoking on the dark verandah. She went into the kitchen and, for the first time, hesitant, took up the motions of using the telephone again. The exchange told her that there would be a two-hour delay before the call came through, but Jason had only just finished washing up and closed the kitchen door behind him when the telephone rang and there was Tom’s voice at the end of a tunnel. It was not the Tom to whom she wrote the letters that belonged to the mainstream of timeless life, but the Tom of their segmentary everyday existence among the bobbing crowd of demands that matter singly and momentarily. He called, tinny through the megaphone of distance, “I was just writing to you, I got back yesterday”, and she said “
I know”, meaning that she knew his news. “They turned up here this morning. They’re here.” There was a second’s awkward silence. “Well, that’s something.”

  “They’re here now.”

  “Are they all right?”

  “Yes, all right. I thought I’d better let Boaz …”

  “Yes, well, he couldn’t think where they could go, that’s the thing. You understand …”

  She knew how he must be looking; she knew what his face must be indicating that he didn’t need to say. Although they could not see each other, familiarity made their communication as elliptic as if they had been face to face.

  “The trouble was, I wasn’t here, you know, but Morgan …”

  She said, “Morgan what?” losing his voice.

  “Morgan, I said. I was at the old chap’s but Morgan stayed at home. He was here. I don’t know how much—anyway, apparently she just suddenly announced she was going, couldn’t stay. Everything was all right before; only the night before. So I thought. Well, Boaz’ll have a load off his mind, he …”

  “But why to me?” she cupped the receiver and shouted an urgent whisper. “I said why to me?” Her whole body was clenched for an answer, as if by some miracle, or, better still, by some good sense, he would give her a simple answer that would let her out, have her rid of them.

  She heard him laugh. A tiny hooter bleated and a voice said, right in her ear, “Three minutes.” “Well thank Christ,” he was saying. “It’ll be all right. I mean they’re all right there, no one … We thought they’d be picked up any day. It’s safe there, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve told them they can’t stay.”

  “Oh. Well, I don’t know. Look, darling, it’s no joke. Boaz is only worried about one thing now. Understand? Jessie? If she gets picked up … Jessie?”

  But it seemed that the police had nothing to do with it, nothing to do with what she was thinking of, nothing to do with them.

  “I can’t believe in it,” she said, and he said, “I didn’t get it—what did you say?” and she couldn’t say “I can’t believe that that’s the danger.”

  “Morgan sends his love.” The change in the voice told her that the child must have come up and be standing by the telephone.

  “Yes. And mine. Don’t put him on the phone, I want to talk to you …” but Morgan’s presence with Tom at the other end of the line, and the presence of the others (she could hear someone moving through the dining-room on the other side of the door) at her end, made it impossible. Disjointed trivialities filled the last minute. “I’ll write to you tonight,” she called while he shouted goodbye, but his yielding, embarrassed “All right” was cut off, leaving her to it.

  Sixteen

  She did not write a letter, but unrest, like the excitement of an unfinished discussion, invaded deep sleep sometime toward morning. A disjointed dialogue went on, first in the eternal second where a dream unrolls and is comprehended totally and instantly, then slowed down to the more ponderous comprehension of the wakeful mind in the ordinary dimension of minutes passing. Have I been awake ten minutes, an hour? At first, though ferreting fully awake behind closed eyes in her sleeping body, she did not know, but gradually the pace that bore the night along became recognisable and measurable without the clock face, as animals feel the pace of the seasons.

  Boaz is only worried about one thing.

  How impossible, how unfair for Boaz that the time should come in a situation like his when the one thing that matters—the reality—gets flung aside by something external and irrelevant. A line in a statute book has more authority than the claims of one man’s love or another’s. All claims of natural feeling are overridden alike by a line in a statute book that takes no account of humanness, that recognises neither love nor respect nor jealousy nor rivalry nor compassion nor hate—nor any human attitude whatever where there are black and white together. What Boaz felt towards Ann; what Gideon felt towards Ann; what Ann felt about Boaz; what she felt for Gideon—all this that was real and rooted in life was void before the clumsy words that reduced the delicacy and towering complexity of living to a race theory. It was not a matter of being a man or a woman, with a mind and a sex, a body and a spirit—it was a matter of qualifying for a licence to make use of these things with which you happened to be born. It was all a routine matter, like the brass dog-tag put away in a cupboard or the third-party-risk insurance disc stuck on the car’s windscreen every year.

  Did Boaz worry about the routine matter (“only one thing now”) because he loved her and didn’t want to see her go to jail? Because he had brought her here and felt responsible for her anyway? Like everything else personal, his reasons were of no importance. The routine matter was something they all flew instantly in their minds to prevent reaching its conclusion; the external reason that differences and even indifference were dropped for, as for war or natural disaster.

  But it was still the one thing that didn’t count. Not between Ann and Boaz and Gideon. Not between Ann and Boaz and Gideon and Tom and herself. Not in that house and not in this. I don’t want to do anything because of a dog licence—she saw the script streaming under her hand; at the same time Tom reading it, answering. —Or because I just happened to be here in this house. Real disinterested kindness is the only sort that’s any use and it comes on impulse. How often in a whole life does one really have that impulse? —She was completely awake now, inhabiting her body from the weight of the cast-off clothes on her feet to the slightly mouldy smell of the pillow under the left side of her head. —She thought with clarity and for herself alone: all other forms of kindness are only actions performed to conform with an image of oneself as a decent, generous person. Like any other image, you get confined in it … from the limit of clothes weighing on toes to the other limit where ear and cheek end at the pillow.

  In the morning Ann was up early. Jessie found her already sitting in the sun on the grass.

  “There’s something out there. I’ve been watching. Swimming out there. Dolphins.” She was all admiration at everything, as if she had just arrived.

  “Porpoises.”

  “They leap right out of the water!”

  “Yes, we see them every day.”

  The sea was some marvellous shining creature that had come up into the world overnight, light streaming off its back. In the radiance they both had the grimace that becomes a smile. Raucous brown birds with yellow beaks were strutting, flying and alighting; their activity seemed to stem from the figures of the two women, as if the birds had been released from their hands.

  The girl’s outstretched fingers held the tousled hair pushed up from her face; it was smooth, filled out in contour again; at her age exhaustion or conflict leave no mark—like visible new growth the tendrils of a warm flush of blood under the skin reached up her neck. She wore the short cotton gown she had worn so often on Sundays at home.

  “Where d’you swim?”

  “Oh anywhere. There are sharks everywhere.” They laughed.

  “Do you want to go down?”

  “Oh I must have one swim. —Do you go?” she said, meaning at that time of day.

  “Often.”

  “Ah, it’s heavenly …” she said, as if she would fly, or melt.

  Jessie lent her a bathing suit. They met again in a minute, on the verandah; Gideon was in the bathroom. They went barefoot, quietly, down through the wet undergrowth, breaking wet spider-webs, and when they were almost on the beach a small figure thudded into them from behind. “I wanted to come!” Madge was panting, her face thick with reproach. “Well, you have come,” said Jessie. “I wanted you to wait for me to get my costume.” “It doesn’t matter, you can swim without it.”

  Ann was not claimed by the interruption; Jessie was reminded, this is the way she sees me, always in the context of demands she doesn’t know, always in the acceptance that I myself, my single being, have quite naturally ceased to exist. But the thought fell away before the sensation of chill sand underfoot and the light-headed
ness induced by the cool, huge air drawn in on an empty stomach. They swam for about half an hour and came up cheerful from the cold water. Jessie said to Ann after breakfast, “Look, Gideon’ll have to sleep in the living-room. This Jason may talk to his friends. He has to come into the rooms to clean up, I can’t keep him out …” Her tone was sensible, planning, and Ann was quick to catch it. She said, biting at a thread of skin beside her thumb-nail, “But what about last night?”

  “I pulled the things off your bed and dumped them on the spare in my room.”

  Ann laughed.

  “We don’t know about these old colonels around here,” said Jessie. “We don’t want some local Ku-Klux posse riding up—you know?”

  Ann said, “Oh, all right then,” thinking that she would tell Gideon about the arrangement when they were alone, but Jessie came upon him smoking in the living-room and explained at once, “That divan’ll have to be your bed, I was just saying to Ann. I don’t trust friend Jason, or rather the people his friends may work for.”

  “What sort of people?”

  “I don’t know them by name, but I know them well enough.”

  “We’ll push off, Jessie,” he said, almost affectionately, completely reasonable. “No, we’ll push off.”

  She picked up Victory where it lay, open, page-down, on the carpet, and put it on a chair.

  The radio was playing (Gideon must have fixed it; it had not worked since Jessie’s arrival), smoke hung in the air, there were litchi pips in an ashtray. When she came back from the beach the first few days she always found Gideon and Ann in the living-room, the shape of their presence hollowing it out after the passing of a morning there. They greeted her ordinarily, concluding for the time being heaven knew what long, inarticulate, meaningful discussion, what private silences. They had invaded her; but she stood in the doorway and felt herself shut out by the self-sufficiency of lovers: she had forgotten it. They drew her back that much, each time, into the temporal world, took her back from the self that persisted in continuity to what could be lost. For a moment she was the one who had nowhere to go.